Saturday, October 31, 2009

Republican state Assemblywoman Dierdre Scozzafava has suspended her campaign for upstate New York's 23rd Congressional District seat, giving a possible boost to Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman against Democrat Bill Owens, Fox News has confirmed.

The move comes on the heels of a new poll that showed Scozzafava had fallen behind her two competitors in a close race.

The special election is Tuesday, and political analysts believe upstate New York could be a preview of congressional races nationwide in 2010 and 2012 as Republican leaders struggle to rebuild, redefine and regain control of Washington.

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AP October 24, 1994 Mayor Rudolph Giuliani rejected his own party's candidate for governor Monday and threw his support behind embattled Democrat Mario Cuomo's bid for a fourth term. . . concerned that Pataki's plan to cut New York's state income tax by 25 percent over four years might mean less state aid to the city. . . "Mario Cuomo will simply be a better governor than George Pataki."

AP August 19, 1994 Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor elected mayor last fall, stood on a stage with Clinton in Minneapolis last week and applauded after the president ripped congressional Republicans who derailed the bill.

AP February 8, 2000 Giuliani has routinely run for mayor with Liberal Party backing. . . "He's wrong on domestic partners, he's wrong on gays in the military, he's wrong on gay rights, he's wrong on rent control, he's wrong on ... we could just go on and on and on," Long said.

AP March 3, 1997 dressed as a woman. . . Giuliani called his feminine alter ego "Rudia." . . . "a Republican pretending to be a Democrat pretending to be a Republican."

AP July 6, 2000 biography of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani claims several members of his family had ties to the mob and that his father fired a gun at a man during a Brooklyn shootout. It also says the law-and-order mayor himself once slugged a guy who ogled his date. . . Giuliani's father, Harold, pleaded guilty and served 18 months in prison for holding up a milkman at gunpoint in the 1930s

AP June 28, 2001 Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, in an effort to escape the strains of his divorce, has forsaken Gracie Mansion for the refuge of a close friend's high-rise apartment, according to published reports. . . apartment is owned by the mayor's friend, Howard Koeppel, a [homosexual] Queens car dealer

UPI February 24, 1982 says living in the suburbs is ''sterile,'' and rural life is a ''joke.'' Koch made the comments in an interview with Playboy magazine . . . Questioned about time wasted in city subways, Koch replied, ''As opposed to wasting time in a car? Or out in the country, wasting time in a pickup truck when you have to drive 20 miles to buy a gingham dress or a Sears Roebuck suit?''

AP March 17, 2006 "If you drive from Schenectady to Niagara ... it looks like Appalachia," Spitzer said . . .Appalachia is a mountainous region with some well-documented, often oppressive rural poverty. It covers all of West Virginia and parts of 12 states, including part of southwestern New York.

NYT June 8, 1994 Brushing aside suggestions of patronage, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani yesterday defended the hiring of four relatives to positions in his administration, saying that they were hired because of merit, not family ties. . . hired Catherine Giuliani, who is married to a cousin, also named Rudy Giuliani, as a program coordinator in the Community Assistance Unit

AP April 29, 2008 Rudy Giuliani should not have received Holy Communion during the pope's visit because the former presidential candidate supports abortion rights, New York Cardinal Edward Egan said Monday. Egan says he had "an understanding" with Giuliani that he is not to receive the Eucharist.

AP March 23, 2007 Giuliani's first marriage to his second cousin, Regina Peruggi, ended after 14 years in divorce and later an annulment. His second marriage, to TV personality Donna Hanover, ended in a bitter divorce

AP May 25, 2001 court order barring the mayor's girlfriend, 46-year-old Judith Nathan, from the mansion . . . Hanover is the oldest of four girls born to Gwen Kofnovec and her husband, Bob, a Czech immigrant and lieutenant commander in the Navy. After studying political science at Stanford University, she graduated from Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism